This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Sunday November 8 -- Got news or an update?

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The President of the United States Said That? (New York Times via National Review)

Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked,

“Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

2:15 PM UPDATE: I've learned that 100 people are being laid off across "several divisions" of the A&E Television Networks yesterday and today "as a direct result of the merger".

It will make those employees feel so much better that management tells me it's "no one in a decision making role." A&E Television Networks in August acquired Lifetime Entertainment, and everything is now owned by the Disney-ABC Television Group, Hearst and NBC Universal.

Award-winning Cuban blogger says she was beaten, detained AFP (McClatchy to not report what their other commie friend is up to)

HAVANA - Secret police agents abducted and beat award-winning blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose online reports chronicle the dark side of everyday life in communist Cuba, on her way to a march for non-violence, she said Saturday.

Three agents in street clothes snatched her and friend Orlando Luis Pardo off the street in the Havana district of Vedado.

GM's about-face has angered both Opel workers and European governments. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, union leader and Opel board member Armin Schild blasts GM for mismanagement and says that the US company is uninterested in saving the Opel brand.

Unlike some Washington Post ombudsmen (ahem, Geneva Overholser), Andrew Alexander deserves credit for raising the question of liberal bias, and reporters’ connections to the liberal movement, even by marriage.

But he didn’t tell the whole story. At best, he gets an I for Incomplete. On Sunday, Alexander reported:

Post reporter Juliet Eilperin covers the contentious issue of climate change. Her husband, a noted expert on the subject, coordinates international climate policy as a part-time senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

She has quoted officials from the liberal think tank in her stories, although not her spouse. Climate change is discussed at home, she said, but a "church-state separation" exists for areas where their work overlaps.

This kind of spousal connection would not be easily tolerated by the Post if Eilperin was a married to an expert for ExxonMobil. She would be moved off the green beat.

Alexander bows briefly to that notion, but doesn’t really buy it: Still, would The Post allow a reporter who covers energy to be paid on the side by a big oil company?

Readers who have come to rely on sports journalist Tom Boswell's quality baseball coverage for the Washington Post, might not have been quite so impressed with Monday's offering:

His column, covering Sunday's World Series game, was sent to the printers awash with typos, grammatical errors and misspellings; generating a number of complaints.

Some readers asked for full 75 cents refund, whilst one reader hit the nail on the head, writing: "Please, rescue Mr. Boswell from the pressure of the midnight deadline. Give him, and your readers, back your copy editors."

Another added: "There is no excuse for such a shoddy product. It's completely unprofessional; more errors than one would see in a high school or college newspaper."

Inexcusable such mistakes may be, but what are the direct causes of such a piece being sent to print?

It would appear that Boswell's typo-strewn column is symptomatic of the Post's various attempts to curb spending.

Having recently closed its College Park printing facility and consolidated operations with its other printing plant in Springfield, the paper has been forced to inch deadlines forward in order to ensure the paper reaches commuters setting off earlier and earlier due to worsening traffic, as well as doing away with many copy editors.

Once again, the white knight who stepped in to save the company--the U.S. taxpayer--gets completely hosed.

It didn't have to be this way, says Prof. Black. And the man responsible is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Peter Gorenstein: Another one of the nation's largest lenders has filed for bankruptcy. On the brink for months, CIT filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sunday.

The prepackaged plan allows CIT to restructure its debt while trying to keep badly needed loans flowing to thousands of mid-sized and small businesses. The plan keeps CIT's operations alive and makes it possible for the company to exit bankruptcy by year's end.

But here's the bad news: While senior debt holders will only lose 30% of their investment, we, the U.S. taxpayer, will lose the entire $2.3 billion we lent the company this summer.

Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are planning to skip a scheduled Tuesday work session on a sweeping climate-change bill, citing what they say is an incomplete economic analysis of the measure by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"The Republicans will not be attending tomorrow," said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for GOP members of the committee. "We still do not have a complete analysis of the bill."

GAO: Full Recoup of Government Investment in GM, Chrysler Unlikely(Obama hands our money to unions)FOX News

A Government Accountability Office report released Monday is the latest review to cast doubt on the likelihood that taxpayers will fully recoup more than $80 billion invested in the two U.S. automakers.

Government investigators say the U.S. government is unlikely to recover all of its investment in General Motors or Chrysler because the companies' value would need to "grow substantially above what they have been in the past."

A Government Accountability Office report released Monday is the latest review to cast doubt on the likelihood that taxpayers will fully recoup more than $80 billion invested in the two U.S. automakers.

President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan.

Trouble is, only 508 people work there. The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press.

Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government's job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.

TORONTO Canada's largest circulation daily has launched what its publisher said will likely be the biggest restructuring in the newspaper's history by offering voluntary buyouts to employees in all divisions of the company.

Toronto Star Publisher John Cruickshank said in a memo to employees Tuesday that the broad reworking of the company will affect every job in every corner of the organization and could include layoffs.

He said the paper is also exploring the possibility of contracting out some work in both copy editing and pagination.

The Star's union said the Star has told them it plans to contract out as many as 100 union editing jobs. The newspaper has 390 employees in the editorial department.

''We must find the best way to operate our business at the lowest possible cost, including contracting out non core functions where there is a sound business case to do so,'' he wrote in the memo. ''This will involve what is likely to be the biggest restructuring of the Star's workforce in its history.''

The newspaper, which celebrated its 117th birthday on Tuesday, has been grappling with industry-wide problems that have worsened with the weaker economy

Yesterday, the White House announced that it was removing Alma Thomas’ plagiaristic piece “Watusi (Hard Edge)” from its walls.

The White House announced that the painting was moved “because it didn’t fit the space right.”

The Washington Post pointed out that posters at FreeRepublic.com had examined the similarity between “Watusi (Hard Edge)” and Henri Matisse’s “The Snail” (1953), ignoring the fact that Big Hollywood actually broke the story.

The Washington Post covered for the White House, explaining, “Stephens’s explanation makes sense because it is inconceivable that the White House’s art experts would imagine Thomas’s painting was fraudulent or a copy … Elaborations on earlier artists’ work, even full appropriation, have been common practice in art for hundreds of years.”

BALTIMORE -- Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon is about to put her political future in the hands of a jury.

Dixon goes on trial Monday on theft charges. She's accused of hitting up her wealthy developer pals to donate thousands of dollars' worth of gift cards to needy families. Prosecutors say she used those gift cards for her personal shopping instead.

Hartford Democrat, Previously Fined For Election Violations, Now Owes Back Taxes To City (Hartford Courant)

HARTFORD — - The woman who landed a temporary job in the office of the registrars of voters after being fined $10,000 by the state for ballot fraud four years ago owes the city $3,500 in back taxes.

Prenzina Holloway is the mother of city council Democratic Majority Leader rJo Winch and a longtime member of the city's Democratic Party.

In 2005, state officials said Holloway voted on behalf of, and forged the signature of, at least one voter during a 2004 Democratic primary, among other violations of state law. The state fined her $10,000.

But because she demonstrated financial hardship, Holloway was allowed to pay only $2,000 of the $10,000 fine, according to a July 18, 2005, agreement she signed.

A year and a half later, in February 2007, Holloway bought a used Hummer H3 for $31,727, state motor vehicle records show. She never paid city taxes on the car, city records show. The state said the Hummer's registration expired in February 2009.

Barack Hussein Obama II, used a crude gay-baiting sexual slur to denigrate Tea Party patriots in a talk with House Democrats yesterday on Capitol Hill, reported the New York Times:

According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked,

“Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

The word 'teabag' is used to describe a sexual practice popular in the homosexual community.

Earlier this year as the anti-big government protest movement exploded across the country, liberals in the media first started calling conservative and libertarian protesters organizing under the Tea Party banner, "teabaggers," in a juvenile effort to gay-bait the protesters. Democrats, including now the president of the United States, have also used the slur.

The gay-baiting slur was used with gusto on MSNBC in April by anchors David Shuster and rachel Maddow.

Newsbusters quoted Shuster:For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15th will be Tax Day. But in our fourth story tonight: It's going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they're going nuts for it.

Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals.

"They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending - spending they did not oppose when they were under presidents Bush and Reagan. They oppose Mr. Obama's tax rates -which will be lower for most of them -- and they oppose the tax increases Mr. Obama is imposing on the rich, whose taxes will skyrocket to a rate about 10 percent less than it was under Reagan. That's teabagging in a nut shell."

Newsbusters also reported the term was used 51 times in one segment on the Rachel Maddow show.

CNN's Anderson Cooper piled on the same week with his own gay-baiting 'teabagging' slurs.

Noting tomorrow’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday’s Today show, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw claimed East Germans were “still adjusting to the harsh economic realities” of life after communism.

But a recent poll of former East bloc countries by the Pew Research Center actually discovered that the people of what was East Germany are actually the biggest enthusiasts of the shift to capitalism, with 82% approving, higher than any other ex-communist country.

Brokaw did note, however, that the current “center-right” Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, was “born and raised in East Germany,” implicitly acknowledging that her youth spent under communism obviously did not make her a fan of leftist economic policies.

The suggestion that capitalism is somehow “harsh” compared to communism echoes what many liberal journalists argued after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. “The transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day,” CBS reporter Bert Quint argued in 1990.

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